EAU CLAIRE – Three crew members from Eau Claire Energy Cooperative joined a team of 45 from Wisconsin who headed to South Carolina on Wednesday to assist with storm recovery efforts after Hurricane Helene left the area with devastating damage.
“We are part of an association of electric cooperatives across the United States, so when one of us experiences a storm or has a major power outage, we often help each other restore power,” said Monica Obrycki, CEO of Eau Claire Energy Cooperative. .
Wednesday morning they met at Rock Energy Cooperative in Janesville before making the trek to Aiken Electric Cooperative in South Carolina. According to the press release, 800,000 people in Florida, Tennessee, North Carolina and South Carolina are without power. Nine other states are sending electric cooperative crews to help repair the damage.
“It’s a dangerous job,” Obrycki said. “Some of the cooperatives have major destruction with thousands of broken poles. Replacing a broken pole is very time consuming, and when you have that many it will take some time to get them operational again.”
She said one of the pieces of equipment they brought from Eau Claire is a backhoe.
“There’s a big drill on it to dig the holes for the posts,” she said. “They drove there because that was one of the most necessary pieces of equipment.”
However, the posts they are going to put in come from a more local supplier.
Obrycki said the crew will spend their nights in “a tent city-like area and they will deploy from there, whether they have to use ATVs or other types of equipment to get where they need to be. They will have to assess that when they get there.”
In the meantime, she assured that people in Eau Claire should not worry about negative impacts on the city’s activities.
“We’re making sure we still have enough crew here in case we have a storm here in Eau Claire,” she said. “We have thirteen line workers, so we still have enough people here to do the local work.”
She expressed praise and appreciation for those who went down for the hurricane recovery efforts.
“They leave their families behind and go to work in very rugged terrain,” she said. “We expect them to be there between one and two weeks.”
